Happy birthday, Sylvia Plath! Here are some quotes from her writing:

“The blood jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it.”

“[L]et me live, love, and say it well in good sentences…”

“[E]verything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen—physical or psychological—wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.”

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am. I am. I am.”

“How frail the human heart must be—
a mirrored pool of thought.”

“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.”

“I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.”

“With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand…hopeless from the start.”

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.”

“The abstract kills, the concrete saves.”